The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    Watching the film is like listening to someone use a lot of impressive words, the meanings of which are just wrong enough to keep you in a state of total confusion, but occasionally right enough to hold your attention. What is he trying to say? It takes a little while to realize that maybe the speaker not only doesn't know but doesn't even care to think things out.
  2. The Boy Behind the Door
    Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus. This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling.
  3. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    With its pointed, cavernous backgrounds and a Gotham City setting that evokes a 1940's-style futurism, "Mask of the Phantasm" looks splendid. But its story is too complicated and the editing too jerky for the movie to achieve narrative coherence. And the resemblance between the movie's hero and its enigmatic arch-villain is so close that audiences are likely to be confused.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl Happy
    The saving grace is the steady stream of tunes, as rhythmical as they are unoriginal, belted out by the star and the other youngsters.
  5. Ex-Husbands
    Pritzker directs genuine performances and has an ear for conversations with the ring of everyday emotion.
  6. Destination Tokyo
    The chief fault, in our estimation, with the Warners' "Destination Tokyo" is that there is just too doggone much of it and is all too conventionally crammed in.
  7. In the Valley of Elah
    However you judge the movie’s politics, and whatever its flaws, there is something inarguable, something irreducibly honest and right, about Mr. Jones’s performance.
  8. The Debt
    As The Debt grows more complex and suspenseful, it also becomes more literal, losing some of its dramatic intensity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Considering the ersatz tension and plotting, Black Christmas is hardly worth the efforts of all concerned.
  10. The Providence Effect
    More an infomercial than a movie, Rollin Binzer’s awed documentary is, at best, a well-earned tribute to one man’s unwavering vision and unrelenting hard work.
  11. Fishing Without Nets
    Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.
  12. My Best Friend
    A comforting, sentimental tale of a kind that would be insufferably maudlin if made in Hollywood and unbearably affectless if it showed up at Sundance. Somehow it’s easier to take in French.
  13. The Client
    The Client, with a fast, no-nonsense pace and three winning performances, is the movie that most clearly echoes the simple, vigorous Grisham style.
  14. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    Couch-potato comedy can't get any lazier than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, but that counts for most of this film's slender charm. [19 Apr 1996, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Land of the Pharaohs
    While it is impressively sweeping in its eye-filling pageantry, this saga of the building of a colossal pyramid 5,000 years ago is staged on the creaky foundation of a tale of palace intrigue that must have been banal even in the First Dynasty.
  16. Liberation Day
    Liberation Day, a documentary of preparations for the concert directed by Mr. Traavik and Ugis Olte, is a consistently understated chronicle of Westerners who are very carefully playing with fire.
  17. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    The result is a frustratingly superficial look at a smart, driven and sometimes frightened young man who always felt as though he were "racing against time."
  18. Father of the Bride
    Father of the Bride shows the sort of rich cultural representation that can happen when people from the cultures being represented are enlisted to tell their own stories.
  19. Mr. Malcolm's List
    A tepid Regency-era romance.
  20. The Good Lie
    For all its softening, The Good Lie, like “Monsieur Lazhar,” has a core of decency, humanity and good will that feels authentic. You won’t curse yourself for occasionally tearing up.
  21. Gay Sex in the 70s
    Within that narrow framework, the film is quite successful, using archival photographs, clips from pornographic films and television commercials, and interviews to evoke the period between June 1969, when the Stonewall riots brought homosexuality out of the shadows, to June 1981, when the AIDS epidemic began.
  22. Wilde Salomé
    Wilde Salomé is most fascinating as a portrait of a superstar actor who, for all his wealth and privilege, encounters unusual frustrations as he pursues genuine artistic ambitions.
  23. The Fox and the Hound
    One of the nicer things that can be said about The Fox and the Hound is that it breaks no new ground whatsoever. This is a pretty, relentlessly cheery, old-fashioned sort of Disney cartoon feature, chock-full of bouncy songs of an upbeatness that is stickier than Krazy-Glue and played by animals more anthropomorphic than the humans that occasionally appear.
  24. The Great Debaters
    The wonder is that The Great Debaters transcends its own simplifying and manipulative ploys; it radiates nobility of spirit.
  25. The Bay
    There is a lot of nasty stuff to look at, but very little that is genuinely haunting, jolting or terrifying.
  26. The Other Side of the Street
    Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles The Other Side of the Street, an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station."
  27. Polina
    If this film’s directors, Valérie Müller and the French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, don’t offer much overt material on Polina’s inner life, it’s because they don’t have to: the point of Polina, and this movie, is that her dancing is her being.
  28. For Lucio
    This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.
  29. Pinocchio
    This new cinematic imagining of Carlo Collodi’s classic fantasy tale is alternately enchanting and befuddling.
  30. Shoshana
    This isn’t so much a film about geopolitics or even history as it is about two lovers torn between passion and obligation.
  31. Puss in Boots
    Puss has his charms, but he is not as memorable a character as Shrek or Shrek's mouthy sidekick, Donkey. Consequently the story, which involves a quest for magic beans and golden eggs, feels improvised and diffuse.
  32. Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D
    His fans will undoubtedly be satisfied: the film packs 23 songs into less than 100 minutes and spotlights the full Chesney, with his tight jeans, faded tank top, worn cowboy hat.
  33. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The new movie, directed by Dean Parisot, is an amiable, sloppy attempt to reassert the value of friendliness and crack a few jokes along the way.
  34. Scarface
    Scarface is the most stylish and provocative - and maybe the most vicious - serious film about the American underworld since Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather."
  35. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    The film produces moments that catch in the throat.
  36. Beauty and the Dogs
    The filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.
  37. The Seagull's Laughter
    Mr. Gudmundsson has created a sleek, light and entertaining work, with a few contrasting pockets of darkness and mystery.
  38. Animal Factory
    Willem Dafoe steals the picture with his comic timing.
  39. Being Julia
    Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.
  40. Manos Sucias
    The light is menacing, the mood watchful and the action scenes have a crude, desperate energy that gets the job done. Here, violence is neither weightless nor glorified, but just another obstacle on the way to a better future.
  41. American Made
    Mr. Cruise’s brisk, ingratiating performance — all smiles, hard-charging physicality and beads of sweat — does a lot to soften the edges. But Mr. Liman doesn’t press Mr. Cruise to dig into the character, and the actor mostly hurdles forward in a movie that never gets around to asking what makes Barry run and why.
  42. The Boy and the Beast
    Mr. Hosoda is skilled with fight scenes, and his settings — the pastel-hued Jutengai and the drab Shibuya, evoked at times with surveillance-camera perspectives and crowd-paranoia angles — are impressive. But the characterizations and conflicts here are strictly generic
  43. Not Fade Away
    By focusing on musicians who are talented but finally not good or persistent enough to succeed in the big time, Not Fade Away offers a poignant, alternative, antiheroic history of the big beat.
  44. Hearts Beat Loud
    With its oversimplified emotions and dumbed-down depiction of the creative process, this inoffensive time-filler dissolves in the mouth like vanilla pudding.
  45. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    Landing lightly on the loneliness of fame and the ravages of aging, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a fond farewell to a distinctive talent. Yet I couldn’t help wishing it had spent less time anticipating Grahame’s death and a little more illuminating her life.
  46. The End of the Affair
    When it comes to holiday films worth swooning over, here's the one to see.
  47. Sex Positive
    The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.
  48. La Femme Nikita
    The film, like Nikita herself, becomes more conventionally sleek and less interestingly bizarre as it moves along.
  49. ¡Viva Maestro!
    Dudamel is a joyfully appealing figure, and the film benefits from following such an amiable subject. But the documentary lacks the rigor it would take to turn this warm portrait into a proper cinematic symphony.
  50. Plainclothes
    While the writer-director Carmen Emmi’s evocative debut relies on a nostalgically textured aesthetic that sometimes seems to mask its thin narrative, the heat builds in unexpected ways, ultimately igniting through the quiet agony of living as someone you’re not.
  51. Jindabyne
    The real flaw is that the movie's best features -- the aching clarity of its central performances -- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.
  52. Compromising Positions
    Although Compromising Positions is supposed to be a comedy and a mystery, the film's comedy is of such a high order that the rather ordinary question of the identity of the murderer seems to be interruptive of Mr. Perry's and Miss Isaacs' otherwise nastily funny, suburban satire. Reduced to its essentials, Compromising Positions is ''Nancy Drew and the Case of the Dissembling Dentist.''... A very entertaining film.
  53. Last Flag Flying
    Even if Last Flag Flying isn’t quite persuasive, it is nonetheless enormously thought-provoking, and its roughness is a sign of how earnestly it grapples with matters that other movies about war prefer not to think about.
  54. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    While Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it.
  55. Throw Down Your Heart
    The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument.
  56. Kill the Jockey
    The director, Luis Ortega, doesn’t give much reason to care about Remo’s conflict — the protagonist’s catatonia inspires the same in the viewer — and instead exhausts his efforts on a mannered blankness of style and mood.
  57. Noises Off...
    There are a number of hefty laughs scattered throughout "Noises Off," Peter Bogdanovich's screen version of Michael Frayn's English stage farce. Yet there are nowhere near as many as the source material deserves and Mr. Bogdanovich's cast might otherwise have earned.
  58. Mr. Untouchable
    There is some acknowledgment of the terrible effects of the drug trade on residents of Harlem and other poor New York neighborhoods, but for the most part Mr. Untouchable clings to the standard hip-hop mythology of the pusher as entrepreneur, rebel, celebrity and folk hero.
  59. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
    Although crudely acted, with laughably inept action sequences and a story that makes little sense, it has the feverish pulse of a classic B movie, boldly angular cinematography and a blaringly cheesy jazz soundtrack.
  60. Crater
    Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.
  61. The Conjuring 2
    The Conjuring 2 does everything you want a sequel to do. It’s as well made as the original, but the location and the story are different enough that it’s not just the same thing all over again.
  62. Velvet Goldmine
    Brilliantly reimagines the glam-rock 70's as a brave new world of electrifying theatricality and sexual possibility, to the point where identifying precise figures in this neo-psychedelic landscape is almost beside the point.
  63. The Other Side
    Whatever genre it belongs to, The Other Side is powerful and disturbing.
  64. Windfall
    Urgent, informative and artfully assembled documentary.
  65. Faust
    The movie expands in its frame, surpassing simple comprehension and continuing to grow in your mind — and perhaps to blow it — long after it’s over.
  66. Whiz Kids
    Tom Shepard's quietly observant documentary tracks its stressed-out subjects through an array of personal and scholarly challenges.
  67. Viva Riva!
    Repackaging the revenge thriller in parakeet colors and distinctive African beats, the Congolese writer and director Djo Tunda Wa Munga gives Viva Riva! a playful sensuality that goes a long way toward disguising formula.
  68. Corpo Celeste
    Ms. Rohrwacher combines a documentary impulse (effective in family scenes) with a more allegorical one. Her film gets clunky when allegory has the upper hand, and that means Corpo Celeste often stumbles, along with its 12-year-old heroine, Marta (Yle Vianello).
  69. A World Not Ours
    Mr. Fleifel helps walk us through the history with an ingratiating voice-over that lightens the seemingly permanent clouds of a dire history.
  70. Speed Sisters
    Subtly rebellious and defiantly optimistic, “Speed Sisters” masks the sound of gunshots with the roar of revving engines. For these women, driving symbolizes a freedom they can otherwise only imagine.
  71. Cocoon
    The softness lacks detail, the butterfly metaphors lack originality, but the movie is pleasant, a balmy introduction to adult feelings of desire and belonging.
  72. Vengeance
    Vengeance, while earnest, thoughtful and quite funny in spots, demonstrates just how difficult it can be to turn political polarization and culture-war hostility into a credible narrative. Its efforts shouldn’t be dismissed, even though it’s ultimately too clever for its own good, and maybe not quite as smart as it thinks it is.
  73. The Housemaid
    Borrowing on certain familiar erotic thriller tropes — let’s all point and stare at the cray-cray lady — it does some back flips and corkscrews appropriate for our time and lands with a cathartic smack.
  74. Lucky Them
    While Ms. Collette grounds Ellie and her emotions in a tough-minded plausibility, she can only hint at what the script fails to deliver: the complexities of a flawed woman’s midlife crisis.
  75. The TV Set
    At times The TV Set seems to unfold almost entirely without exaggeration.
  76. Sneakers
    Sneakers is jokey without being funny, breathless without creating suspense, in part because of the feeble plot.
  77. The Dead Girl
    Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage.
  78. Circumstance
    Though it lacks the artful, headlong immediacy of "The Circle" and "Offside," Jafar Panahi's films about women in Tehran - and the breakneck exuberance of Bahman Ghobadi's "No One Knows About Persian Cats," about Tehran's underground music scene - Circumstance ripples with the indignant energy of youthful rebellion.
  79. Swan Song
    Kier is unfailingly captivating in the film, which makes it all the more bothersome that the film itself doesn’t match him.
  80. Love Jones
    Slinky, sexy Love Jones brings new life to an old story: a courtship and all its predictable detours on the road to romance, with a boy-meets-girl inexorability along the way to love.
  81. Maryam
    There's not much here; some of the shots feel so static that you wonder if they're being rehearsed before your eyes.
  82. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    (Spielberg) tells the story slowly and films it with lucid, mesmerizing objectivity, creating a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams's unusually restrained. modernist score.
  83. Journey from Zanskar
    At times you wish Mr. Marx had sharper storytelling skills (or a better editor). Some important details seem clear only in retrospect, and some remain murky. Still, Mr. Marx shines a light on a place and a way of life that are rapidly changing.
  84. My Brooklyn
    My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson's sensitive study of gentrification in her home borough, is as much personal essay as urban-policy survey.
  85. A Tale of Two Sisters
    In a subversion of the usual horror-movie rhythm, the central secret is revealed about halfway through.
  86. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    It’s a full three-ring affair, complete with puffs of smoke, glitter and grunge, some hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo and even a dwarf.
  87. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear
    The enthusiastic Zucker, Zucker & Abrahams style of movie parody is too rarely seen to prompt much head-shaking about gags that don't work. The entire film is justified by those gags that do succeed, beginning with a pre-credit sequence that is possibly one of the most blithely hilarious six or seven minutes of film stock ever exposed to light.
  88. A Call to Spy
    One wishes the movie had been imagined as a limited series, which would give viewers an opportunity to spend more time with these women whose lives were so clearly rich and textured — not to mention, courageous.
  89. 6ixtynin9
    Rejoices in a plot as tricky as its spelling.
  90. Arlington Road
    While this film's conception of a terrorist threat is apparent early on, its strength lies in a string of ingenious little surprises.
  91. Caught Stealing
    For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise.
  92. The Salt of Life
    Mr. Di Gregorio wrote the screenplay with Valerio Attanasio, and this movie is a richer variation of his small, exquisite 2010 film, "Mid-August Lunch."
  93. Drama/Mex
    Drama/Mex means to say something about its country of origin, though it’s hard to know exactly what.
  94. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    It’s difficult to dislike a documentary with such noble, generous subjects, but the film is unfocused and repetitious, not sure whether it is a road trip, a story of a couple or an exploration of small art institutions.
  95. Unexpected
    The nuanced performances of Ms. Smulders and Ms. Bean are flawless. Yet the movie’s calm levelheadedness is a subtle detriment. Everything is a little too easy.
  96. Operation Mincemeat
    Operation Mincemeat is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic.
  97. Paternal Instinct
    Warm and fuzzy documentary.
  98. The Runaways
    The movie may be a little too tame in the end, but at its best it is just wild enough.
  99. Gallipoli
    Mr. Weir's work has a delicacy, gentleness, even wispiness that would seem not well suited to the subject. And yet his film has an uncommon beauty, warmth and immediacy, and a touch of the mysterious, too.
  100. Letters to Father Jaakob
    Letters transforms a picture-postcard location and odd-couple narrative into a pretty, and pretty predictable, snooze. Yet the acting is flawless, the tone gentle and observational, and Leila's transformation, when it occurs, is unforced and unaccompanied by pious lecturing.
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